 |           |
TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JANUARY 23, 2013
There was a split decision for the day's lead story. The choice was national security either way -- but should it be the Pentagon or the State Department? CBS and ABC both chose to kick off with the military's decision to open its combat ranks to women warriors. NBC opted for the pinstripers of Foggy Bottom, as Andrea Mitchell led with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton's daylong testimony to Congress on last September's lethal militia assault on the consulate in Benghazi. Madame Secretary turned out to be Story of the Day. All three newscasts assigned a female correspondent to State, and a male to DoD.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JANUARY 23, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
WOMEN WARRIORS OR MADAME SECRETARY? There was a split decision for the day's lead story. The choice was national security either way -- but should it be the Pentagon or the State Department? CBS and ABC both chose to kick off with the military's decision to open its combat ranks to women warriors. NBC opted for the pinstripers of Foggy Bottom, as Andrea Mitchell led with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton's daylong testimony to Congress on last September's lethal militia assault on the consulate in Benghazi. Madame Secretary turned out to be Story of the Day. All three newscasts assigned a female correspondent to State, and a male to DoD.
"What difference, at this point, does it make?" was the non-answer soundbite from the Secretary of State that was featured on all three newscast packages: by NBC's Andrea Mitchell, CBS' Margaret Brennan and ABC's Martha Raddatz. Thus a sometimes tearful, sometimes impassioned, Rodham Clinton dodged the issue of what inspired the attack, and whether the protests against a low-budget movie blaspheming against the Prophet Mohammed played any role whatsoever. NBC followed up Mitchell's report with Richard Engel's first-hand account of the late Moammar Khadafy's massive arsenal falling into the hands of militiamen all over northern Africa. A "Pandora's Box" was the line from Brennan on CBS.
All three Pentagon correspondents showed us military women who had already been wounded in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though they were technically deployed behind the lines. Rep Tammy Duckworth, a helicopter veteran who had her legs blown off, was quoted by ABC's David Kerley and NBC's Jim Miklaszewski -- Miklaszewski landed the better of the two soundbites. Given that CBS' David Martin was able to introduce us to Victoria Rivers, an expert machine-gunner, who has already fought on commando raids, there was no excuse for ABC's Kerley to use a fictional Hollywood-produced movie clip to illustrate the idea of female special operations forces. Demi Moore, getting her head shaved in GI Jane, was not a soldier. She was an actress.
WEDNESDAY’S WORDS On Tuesday, NBC's Andrea Mitchell filed a report on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe-vs-Wade decision that was illustrated by theories about rape from pro-life politicians. Now CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook has an interesting follow-up from the American College of Obstetricians that should be picked up by ABC and NBC too. Unfortunately it was only covered on CBS as a brief q-&-a, not a full report, without explicitly connecting the public policy dots. Dr LaPook told us that many unwanted pregnancies are connected to domestic violence, rape and so-called "birth control sabotage." Check it out.
Score one for the National Rifle Association and its allies. In the debate about gun control legislation, activists have often claimed that it is access to videogames -- not to firearms -- that makes killing easy. Now a royal soldier agrees. Check out ABC's Lama Hasan with Prince Harry's soundbite in praise of PlayStation and XBOX for training his thumbs to be more lethal. Keir Simmons' coverage on the prince on NBC on Tuesday missed out on that gem.
For the second day in a row, all three newscasts tell us how cold it is. For the second day in a row, CBS chooses the more serious angle, with Elaine Quijano visiting the tent-dwelling homeless in Staten Island, dislocated by Superstorm Sandy. NBC's Kevin Tibbles and ABC' Gio Benitez both filed a standard How Cold Is It? round-up. Benitez wins with his Duluth bubbles-and-banana.
CBS in general gets high marks for its economic coverage, spending more time over the last couple of years on the housing crisis, on the jobs crisis, and on the plight of the poor. CBS gets low marks for its enthusiasm for sucking up to corporate CEOs, asking advice on how to fix the political economy. Captains of industry from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Honeywell and American Express do not tend to be disinterested observers in this regard. So Anthony Mason, in Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, did not need to offer such deference to the CEO of JP Morgan Asset Management.
It is a rare day that the normally-serious CBS newscast decides to close with an animal feature. Anna Werner's chimpanzees represent such an exception.
ABC offered a pair of sports stories, Ron Claiborne to cross-promote the Australian Open tennis tournament (aired by Disney-owned ESPN-2), and Matt Gutman to cross-promote the daytime talkshow katie (syndicated by Disney).
What is the lesson we can all draw from Manti Te'o, ABC's Diane Sawyer asked her colleague Katie Couric, as a follow-up to the free publicity (at the tail of Gutman's videostream) for her exclusive sitdown with the Notre Dame linebacker. Te'o had carried on a remote, four-year platonic romance with a girlfriend who never existed, and won national sympathy for his bereavement over her non-existent death from leukemia. The story had been all over ESPN and Sports Illustrated. Yet for Couric, "the moral of the story is: be careful of who you are communicating with online, be skeptical, even cynical perhaps."
How about this? "Be careful when you hear inspirational, heart-string-tugging human-interest sports journalism, be skeptical, even cynical perhaps."
"What difference, at this point, does it make?" was the non-answer soundbite from the Secretary of State that was featured on all three newscast packages: by NBC's Andrea Mitchell, CBS' Margaret Brennan and ABC's Martha Raddatz. Thus a sometimes tearful, sometimes impassioned, Rodham Clinton dodged the issue of what inspired the attack, and whether the protests against a low-budget movie blaspheming against the Prophet Mohammed played any role whatsoever. NBC followed up Mitchell's report with Richard Engel's first-hand account of the late Moammar Khadafy's massive arsenal falling into the hands of militiamen all over northern Africa. A "Pandora's Box" was the line from Brennan on CBS.
All three Pentagon correspondents showed us military women who had already been wounded in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though they were technically deployed behind the lines. Rep Tammy Duckworth, a helicopter veteran who had her legs blown off, was quoted by ABC's David Kerley and NBC's Jim Miklaszewski -- Miklaszewski landed the better of the two soundbites. Given that CBS' David Martin was able to introduce us to Victoria Rivers, an expert machine-gunner, who has already fought on commando raids, there was no excuse for ABC's Kerley to use a fictional Hollywood-produced movie clip to illustrate the idea of female special operations forces. Demi Moore, getting her head shaved in GI Jane, was not a soldier. She was an actress.
WEDNESDAY’S WORDS On Tuesday, NBC's Andrea Mitchell filed a report on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe-vs-Wade decision that was illustrated by theories about rape from pro-life politicians. Now CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook has an interesting follow-up from the American College of Obstetricians that should be picked up by ABC and NBC too. Unfortunately it was only covered on CBS as a brief q-&-a, not a full report, without explicitly connecting the public policy dots. Dr LaPook told us that many unwanted pregnancies are connected to domestic violence, rape and so-called "birth control sabotage." Check it out.
Score one for the National Rifle Association and its allies. In the debate about gun control legislation, activists have often claimed that it is access to videogames -- not to firearms -- that makes killing easy. Now a royal soldier agrees. Check out ABC's Lama Hasan with Prince Harry's soundbite in praise of PlayStation and XBOX for training his thumbs to be more lethal. Keir Simmons' coverage on the prince on NBC on Tuesday missed out on that gem.
For the second day in a row, all three newscasts tell us how cold it is. For the second day in a row, CBS chooses the more serious angle, with Elaine Quijano visiting the tent-dwelling homeless in Staten Island, dislocated by Superstorm Sandy. NBC's Kevin Tibbles and ABC' Gio Benitez both filed a standard How Cold Is It? round-up. Benitez wins with his Duluth bubbles-and-banana.
CBS in general gets high marks for its economic coverage, spending more time over the last couple of years on the housing crisis, on the jobs crisis, and on the plight of the poor. CBS gets low marks for its enthusiasm for sucking up to corporate CEOs, asking advice on how to fix the political economy. Captains of industry from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Honeywell and American Express do not tend to be disinterested observers in this regard. So Anthony Mason, in Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, did not need to offer such deference to the CEO of JP Morgan Asset Management.
It is a rare day that the normally-serious CBS newscast decides to close with an animal feature. Anna Werner's chimpanzees represent such an exception.
ABC offered a pair of sports stories, Ron Claiborne to cross-promote the Australian Open tennis tournament (aired by Disney-owned ESPN-2), and Matt Gutman to cross-promote the daytime talkshow katie (syndicated by Disney).
What is the lesson we can all draw from Manti Te'o, ABC's Diane Sawyer asked her colleague Katie Couric, as a follow-up to the free publicity (at the tail of Gutman's videostream) for her exclusive sitdown with the Notre Dame linebacker. Te'o had carried on a remote, four-year platonic romance with a girlfriend who never existed, and won national sympathy for his bereavement over her non-existent death from leukemia. The story had been all over ESPN and Sports Illustrated. Yet for Couric, "the moral of the story is: be careful of who you are communicating with online, be skeptical, even cynical perhaps."
How about this? "Be careful when you hear inspirational, heart-string-tugging human-interest sports journalism, be skeptical, even cynical perhaps."
